America’s Long and Gruesome History of Botched Executions

Photo: F. Carter Smith/Sygma/Corbis

Two weeks ago, things went horribly wrong with the execution of Clayton D. Lockett, a 38-year old Oklahoma man convicted of shooting a young woman and burying her alive. After executioners initiated what was meant to be a lethal injection, Lockett began writhing and tried to rise from the table; he died of an apparent heart attack 43 minutes after the procedure began. But we should not be surprised.

Between 1890 and 2010, the U.S. executed 8,776 people. Of those executions, 276 were bungled in some way, according to Sarat’s research. Condemned prisoners have been unintentionally decapitated by hanging or hung twice after the rope broke the first time. Others have caught fire in the electric chair or been subjected to a slow death in a leaky gas chamber. Sarat describes these cases in unflinching detail, but he gives similar treatment to the crimes of the condemned, believing that they too need to be part of the conversation.

Sarat says science and technology have played important roles in shaping capital punishment in America over the past century. But his research finds that while the methods of execution have changed, their efficiency has not improved. In fact, between 1980 and 2010 the rate of botched executions was higher than ever: 8.53 percent.

He spoke with WIRED about why he believes the long history of executions gone wrong deserves more attention in the current conversation about the death penalty in America.

WIRED: How unusual is a botched lethal injection like the recent one in Oklahoma?

Austin Sarat: The fact that an execution was botched, or that a lethal injection was botched, was in itself not unusual. In doing the research for the book we found that from 1890 to 2010, just over 3 percent of all American executions were botched. Since the introduction of lethal injection in 1980, just over 7 percent of lethal injections have been botched.

WIRED: Lethal injection is legal in 32 states. How did it become our preferred means of execution?

Sarat: Lethal injection is just the latest iteration of the marriage of the American death penalty and ideas about scientific progress. It’s the same story that can be told about how we ended up with the electric chair or the gas chamber. Over the course of the 20th century we went from hanging to the electric chair, with some states opting instead for the gas chamber.

Then finally in the early 1980s we saw the introduction of lethal injection. With each development in the technology of execution, the same promises have been made, that each new technology was safe, reliable, effective and humane. Those claims have not generally been fulfilled.

Reproduced, with permission, from Gruesome Spectacles by Austin Sarat

WIRED: In the case of lethal injection, how can things go wrong?

Sarat: Executioners can have difficulty finding the vein because often inmates on death row have been intravenous drug users, and their veins are collapsed. Some are dramatically overweight and it’s just hard to find a vein. Executioners may have to engage in a rather dramatic procedure called a cut down procedure, in which they use a scalpel to cut into the arm or leg to expose a vein. Another thing that can go wrong is that, as with any administration of drugs, an inmate can have an adverse reaction, such as convulsions. The tubes that carry the drugs can get clogged.

Part of the story with lethal injection is that the American Medical Association doesn’t want doctors engaged with it, so you have untrained personnel trying to do these jobs. And if there’s the slightest difficulty, often they’re beyond their level of competence and training.

WIRED: Let’s talk more about how the science and technology of the time have influenced how we execute people. You write that hanging has been the dominant method of execution through human history.

Sarat: At least through American history. Hanging was the dominant method of execution in the United States well into the 20th century. And even hanging was subjected to a kind of an effort to get the technology right. The way in which hanging is supposed to work is that the drop is supposed to break the neck. If you don’t get the drop right, there are at least two possible adverse consequences. One is that the condemned slowly strangles. The other, which is more rare but does happen, is that the condemned is decapitated.

WIRED: How did those types of fumbled hangings result in the rise of electrocutions?

Sarat: The legitimacy of capital punishment in the U.S. has really been tied up with the belief that by following technological progress we could execute in a way that was compatible with the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Proponents of electrocution believed that death by electricity would be quicker and more reliable.

The New York state commission that recommended the introduction of electrocution in the late 19th century wrote that “the velocity of current is so great that the brain is paralyzed, is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.” That’s what they thought.

What's legal where?

Lethal injection: 32 states

Electrocution: 9 states

Gas chamber: Arizona, California, Missouri, and Wyoming

Hanging: New Hampshire and Washington

Firing squad: Oklahoma (but only if other methods are ruled unconstitutional)

No death penalty: 18 states and the District of Columbia

WIRED: In actual practice, what kinds of things have gone wrong?

Sarat: In some cases, the current was not sufficient to cause death or sufficient to cause a quick death. In some cases inmates actually caught on fire.

WIRED: How did executions by lethal gas arise?

Sarat: The gas chamber is an early 20th century competitor with electrocution starting in the 1920s. Some of that is prompted by the use of lethal gas in World War I. It was thought to be a quick acting poison and a reliable way to get people to die in a humane and allegedly painless way.

WIRED: But in reality?

Sarat: There were technological failures. Cyanide gas is the most popular form, and it has to be at the right temperature [below about 79 degrees Fahrenheit it becomes a liquid]. You have to seal the chamber so the gas doesn’t escape. If you don’t get enough of the killing agent the result is a gruesome strangulation.

WIRED: In the book you mention that there’s one method with no documented botched executions, but you don’t say much about it.

Sarat: The firing squad. We don’t talk much about it because in 120 years there were only 34 executions. It’s not been an important technology in part because it seemed to be unusually gruesome. As the courts have interpreted the 8th Amendment, they’ve said executions have to be compatible with the evolving standards of decency in society, and I think the firing squad is hard to square with that kind of commitment.

WIRED: If there were an execution method that met that standard and had an extremely low failure rate, how would that change the discussion about capital punishment?

Sarat: I think the conversation about capital punishment shouldn’t be about abstract concepts like revenge and retribution, and it shouldn’t be about hypotheticals like what if we had a foolproof manner of execution. Our attention should be focused on what actually happens in the death penalty process we have. So, the question is whether we want to live with a 3 to 7 percent error rate, especially when it’s compounded with errors in conviction and unfairness in the decisions about who gets the death penalty.

WIRED: Do you think the recent execution in Oklahoma will influence that conversation?

Sarat: The context in which this one occurred is, if not unique, very distinctive. Botched executions have never played a substantial role in the national conversation about whether we should retain capital punishment. They’ve been treated as mere accidents. They’ve been written off to a drunken hangman or the incompetence of the executioner, as if they’re telling us nothing systematic about capital punishment itself.

This execution has happened at a time of national reconsideration of capital punishment. The death penalty is really declining. I’m tempted to say it’s dying in the United States. Public support is down, the number of death sentences over the last decade or so has been cut by two thirds, the number of executions is down by about 50 percent. More and more, Americans are focusing on the practical realities and worrying that while the death penalty might in some abstract way satisfy some people, when you look at how it’s actually administered, maybe it’s not worth the cost. And I think the Oklahoma execution furthers that conversation.